The last thing Sharlene Wells Hawkes wants is someone to refer to her as a former Miss America. She has spent 20 years trying to move past it — past the image, the jokes, the cartoons, the cliches. Hasn't she outgrown it by now, anyway? Then again, if she hadn't been Miss America, we probably wouldn't be talking about her, would we? So let's get this out of the way.
The tiara is in a closet. The trophy is hidden on a corner shelf in her husband Bob's office. The gown is in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints museum (you have to have an appointment to see it — it's in a box, inside a drawer, in archives.) She has three trunks of Miss America memorabilia in the basement somewhere, one of them devoted entirely to "keys of the city" she collected from her travels, which have since been confiscated by her children.
There is a large photograph of her as Miss America in the living room — Bob's idea, she says. Before the Hawkeses hosted a party, she removed the photo from the wall and hid it. Bob searched the house and found it. When the guests arrived, she looked up and — hey, how did that get back there?
Wind through the back roads of Centerville, past pastures and horse corrals, and there she is, Miss America, 1985. She shares a large two-story house on five acres with Bob — a physical therapist in private practice — and their four children, Monica, 13; Nicole, 10; Sarah, 8; and Jacob, 6.
It took the kids a while to realize that Mom was Miss America and what that meant. Years ago, Monica climbed in the car after school one day and stared at her mom for a few moments before finally asking, "Were you really Miss America?" Kids at school had asked her about it that day.
Hawkes greets a morning visitor wearing sweats and no makeup, looking a little sleepy, with her hair pulled back in a disheveled ponytail. She turned 40 this week. She moans about wrinkles, and there are a few of those, but her face has actually become more handsome with age — leaner, more angular, the jaw a little squarer, highlighted by pale blue-green eyes and a smile straight out of a milk ad.
She never got the slight bump on her nose fixed, as some suggested. She became self-conscious about it when insensitive reporters asked her if she planned to get it repaired after winning the crown. No one else would have noticed it. She learned to hide it in photographs years ago by turning her head down and slightly to the right. To wit: the photos on this page.
Women will love this: The winner of the 1985 Miss America swimsuit competition weighed 185 pounds after the birth of her last child. "I went into the delivery room weighing 185, gave birth to an 8-pound baby, and came out of the delivery room weighing 185," she says. "I don't get the math on that one."
She dumped 60 pounds with exercise and dieting.
"I remember standing in my kitchen and dropping a spoon and thinking, 'it's not worth the effort to pick it up,' " she says. "I decided I wanted my energy back. I didn't want to think about whether I had the energy to climb the stairs. Plus, Bob was really on me about it."
Even without the exercise, Hawkes probably would have dropped the weight anyway because her lifestyle is almost aerobic and always has been.
After serving as Miss America and graduating from Brigham Young University, she worked full time for ESPN for seven years before scaling back to free-lance assignments so she could raise a family.
She has covered the Kentucky Derby nine years in a row, and, over the years, everything else you can or can't imagine: soap box races, world lumberjack championships, Big 10 football, the French Open, America's Cup, World Cup soccer, the Olympic trials. She has interviewed Larry King, Donald Trump, Monica Seles, Jean Claude van Damme, Troy Aikman, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan (he also stood her up once, after making her wait outside a locker room for three hours), George Strait, Richard Dreyfuss, the Back Street Boys, Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi (he insisted on showing her pictures of his cars, which he kept in his wallet), Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson. ("Can you imagine me and those two?!" she says. "That was a funny scene.")
Besides rearing four children and managing a family, she has written two books and produced two CDs (she sings and plays the piano) and belongs to a national speakers bureau, speaking (and singing and playing piano) for groups around the country. Recently, she was hired as vice president of communications for Monarch Health Systems, a new international health and weight management company based in Salt Lake City.
At a time when settling into a quiet middle age of domesticity would seem like an easy option for a person of means, she decided to return to school three years ago. She planned to pursue an MBA but couldn't afford it nor make the schedule work with her family life. Instead, she has nearly completed a master's degree in communication at the University of Utah, specifically in integrated marketing and brand management.
"I guess, in my way, I wanted to balance that M.A. title with an M.A. title," she says. (Hint: Miss America and master's degree.) "It gives it the credibility balance."
Hawkes has spent the past two decades trying to live down the Miss America title and do something she considers more substantive.
"I was so young, it's really hard to know what my life would have been like if (Miss America) hadn't happened," she says. "I am now heading in the same direction I was planning pre-Miss America. I got totally off track. I was planning an MBA and a career in international business or international relations. Now, 20 years later, I'm finally getting back on track. I just got distracted."
The officials at ESPN didn't even know she had been Miss America when they hired her. They had seen a tape of her sports work for KSL-TV and brought her to New York for an interview. She gave them a resume but intentionally left out one detail: the Miss America title. They didn't make the connection, because by then she was going by her married name.
"I thought if I told them, they'd focus on that and maybe conclude that I was just a beauty queen," she recalls. It was only later, after she was hired, that she decided to come clean.
"I felt bad, so in the interest of full disclosure, I told them," she says. "They said, 'No way! Really?!' They didn't have a clue."
For years she tried to do the same thing in other endeavors, but wherever she spoke she was introduced as Miss America. "I tried to hide it. I figured I had done a lot of stuff since then," she says. "But I gave up. No matter how old and gray and wrinkly I get, I'll always be Miss America."
There are worse fates, but her term as Miss America and the ensuing years weren't all White House visits and curtain calls. She was the "antidote" to the previous year's Miss America, Vanessa Williams, who resigned when it was revealed that she had done a nude magazine layout.
Along came the blonde, clean-living Mormon girl. During her year as Miss America, there were cartoons of her dressed as a pioneer in a covered wagon. There were the inevitable jokes about being a dumb blond beauty queen. Bob Hope opened a show making jokes about her. Her religion, her title and even her nose made her an easy target.
"I would say that 50 percent of everything written about me was not positive," she recalls. "I came home embarrassed about the whole thing. After that, you assume people don't think highly of you. I really thought 'That's how all people feel.' "
When she returned to BYU, she was so embarrassed that she wore a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes so she wouldn't be recognized.
Miss America was something she thought she would do for a summer and that was the end of it. She was a sophomore at BYU when her mother, Helen, suggested the pageant.
"She said I should try it because it was based 50 percent on talent," says Hawkes. "The only reason I did it is because in Utah they don't do swimsuit in public — it's in private."
But at the national level, there she was, Miss Utah, parading in a swimsuit in front of a worldwide audience. When she won the swimsuit competition, her father joked, "Couldn't you have won the talent show?"
"To win swimsuit shocked me more than winning Miss America," she says. "I didn't look like the other girls. The Racquel Welch types. I was more the athletic type. The industry insiders said, 'They must have really liked you in the interview.' That stuff sticks with you."
All these years later, it still seems to stick. This is what she says: "I still come up with reasons I won Miss America. I think, well, it must be because I gave an intelligent interview. That's the only reason I can think of. I just don't put myself in that category of models."
Miss America and almost everything that's happened since then have been a big accident, she believes. TV and beauty pageants weren't part of the plan.
She was going to be an architect, a veterinarian, an ambassador, a concert pianist, a singer and an international businesswoman.
"I love a lot of stuff," she says. "I'm curious about everything."
She grew up in a musical, educated, successful family. All but one of her six siblings has a master's degree. Her mother was a schoolteacher and a concert pianist, and her father, Robert E. Wells, was an executive with Citibank who did international work. Sharlene spent 12 years of her youth in South and Central America, living at times in Paraguay, Argentina, Ecuador and Mexico. Later, when her father was called as a general authority in the LDS Church, they moved to Salt Lake City. When Sharlene was 12, the family moved again to South America, to Chile and later to Argentina, where he headed LDS missions.
At 5-foot-8, she played for school volleyball, basketball and soccer teams and was a standout hurdler and team captain of the track squad. She studied piano, voice, trumpet and harp (she played a Paraguayan harp for the talent segment of the Miss America pageant). She tried theater and choirs. She learned to speak Spanish fluently and pulled straight A's.
The house rule: Bedtime was 9 p.m. That meant she had to get up at 3 a.m. to do her homework and write papers.
"There just wasn't enough time in the day to squeeze everything in," she says.
She was 16 when the family moved back to Utah. After graduating from Skyline High, she enrolled at BYU. She began as a music major, then switched to English, then communications.
She was driven to excel and grew up with a fear of mediocrity. At BYU, she was getting a B in a class, so she hired a tutor and got an A. Her worst grade: an A-minus in international business.
During her reign as Miss America, she applied to Harvard and got as far as an invitation to a formal interview, but she changed her mind and returned to BYU. She backpacked through Europe with her sister Elaine and planned to attend Oxford in the fall. Then she met Bob and married instead.
She graduated magna cum laude with the top GPA in the communications department. A TV magazine show offered her a job, but she considered it too fluffy, especially for someone trying to dodge the beauty-queen stereotype. KSL-TV offered her a job in sports. It was fluff, too, but it was also breaking new ground. Women generally didn't hold such jobs in those days.
She studied football in weekly sessions with BYU coaches Lance Reynolds and Dick Felt. She watched "Monday Night Football" and made a list of questions during the telecasts to ask the coaches that week. What's a nickelback? What's the red zone? What's a screen pass?
That was just one of her challenges. On the BYU sideline, she was still the beauty queen doing the football gig. Fans pelted her with wet marshmallows and insults. "I wanted to quit so many times, but I didn't want to be a coward," she recalls.
Eventually, she landed the job and a contract with ESPN, which still gives her several assignments a year. Later, she would write a book called, "Kissing a Frog: Four Steps to Finding Comfort Outside Your Comfort Zone." "I decided when I was a girl I would never not do something because I was afraid," she says. For three years, she was scared every time she stood in front of an ESPN camera, but she mastered her fear, won an Emmy nomination and fashioned a long career.
You'd be surprised how difficult it was for Miss America to get a date. When Hawkes returned to BYU, she had virtually no social life. Her parents said it was because her title intimidated the suitors, but Hawkes figured it was because "I wasn't cute or sweet enough." Finally, she took the initiative. She jokingly told a friend who was dating Bob Hawkes that when she was done with him to let her know. Bob heard about this and asked her out.
"I hated being in that aggressive position, but it was like, if I'm going to get a date I'm going to have to ask someone," says Hawkes, relaxing in her living room.
She supported Bob while he attended Boston University, relying on the ESPN contract, which paid her $250,000 over five years. When he started working, she quit to raise a family. "That was scary, going from 250 to zero," she says.
They bought the Centerville property cheap early in their marriage and lived in a series of small homes and duplexes. They moved eight times in eight years and saved money to build their current home.
The house has the feel of a lodge, with wooden floors and high ceilings and large timber posts and beams. There is an antler chandelier and an antique mantle they bought years ago and stored in their basement until they had a house to build around it. The property is ringed by white fence and a field Bob cleared of trees himself with a tractor. They keep a couple of horses, but Sharlene doesn't like to ride unless there is a purpose, such as one of the horsepack trips they take each year in the mountains.
Bob, a private man who shies away from interviews, was reared in Idaho and is an avid outdoorsman. The family camps in the Tetons annually and takes canoe trips. Miss America goes three days without a bath, peeling potatoes and cooking over an open fire. In the winter, the family skis together, and they have traveled extensively.
Hawkes seems to be taking her children down a path similar to the one she followed. Her kids can play after piano lessons and reading and homework. "No kid wants to practice the piano — nobody likes a lot of work — but they don't have a cow outside that they can milk every day, and I want them to have something they have to do that requires discipline and work. It's not piano training; it's attitude training.
"I want them to be well-rounded," she continues. "If they can love reading, if they can love something with music, if they can do something physical — some kind of sport, like skiing or biking — if they can have a spiritual side and have a social life, then they'll be well-rounded."
For her part, Hawkes continues to do speaking engagements and ESPN gigs and music, but Monarch will soon be a full-time job while she juggles family responsibilities.
"I was never told growing up that it was one or the other," she says of career and family. "I've never given myself limits. My whole plan was to go full steam ahead on everything I like. If there are conflicts, I already know family is the priority."
Starting into her fifth decade, Hawkes is finally doing what she wanted to do years ago. She will work as an executive for an international business firm. Monarch Health Sciences has retained some of the world's foremost experts in weight management, exercise physiology, psychology and nutrition.
"I am so jazzed about it," she says. "I love to be part of the creative process and to be involved in management. This is a company that is international and is on the move, with great signs of progress. I am not a good bench warmer. I want to be in the game."
E-mail: drob@desnews.com